Vegetable spawns larceny, luxury in Peru

JUNIN, Peru — Thieves recently broke into a storehouse in this farming town high in the Andes, knocked the manager over the head and made off with 2,600 pounds of contraband.

Trucks have been surreptitiously crossing the border, laden with an illicit substance bound for China. And with the price of their signature crop soaring, once-poor farmers bounce along the unpaved roads in shiny new vehicles.

The precious stuff that has provoked sudden larceny and luxury here is not drugs, gems or precious metals.

It’s a pungent, turniplike vegetable called maca, heralded as a cancer-fighting superfood and sold on the shelves of supermarkets like Whole Foods.

It is so popular in China for its perceived aphrodisiac effects that this year Chinese buyers showed up here with suitcases full of cash to buy up the harvest.

As maca booms, some Peruvians fear they’re losing control of a valuable crop with a history that goes back long before the time of the Inca empire.

Officials say that many Chinese buyers smuggled the root out of the country in violation of a law that requires maca to be processed in Peru before it can be exported — a measure intended to protect local businesses.

They say seeds also were smuggled out of the country illegally, despite a ban meant to prevent the root from being grown anywhere else.

“Thousands of acres are being grown outside the country without authorization,” said Andres Valladolid, president of Peru’s National Commission Against Biopiracy.

Oswaldo Castillo, a maca grower and processor, worried that the Chinese “will get a monopoly over maca and be able to set the price on the world market.”